Bamboo promises 'win-win' after decades of tropical forest loss

Arief Rabik and his team at Indobamboo have a proposal : Plant two million hectares of sustainable bamboo plantations to be managed by 1000 villages across Indonesia.

That's the goal over the next 15 years for Indobamboo, a grassroots project supported by the Indonesian Government. Arief Rabik is an environmental scientist who's worked with bamboo for the past 15 years. He is also the son of designer Linda Garland, who pioneered some of the first global bamboo efforts over 20 years ago when she started the Environmental Bamboo Foundation, and hosted an international bamboo conference in Bali in 1995.

After decades of escalating tropical forest loss, the aim is to create an economy based on restoring degraded lands, as well as growing an industrial scale resource driven by local communities. Arief says world wide, bamboo is a 'power tool' that could create a restoration economy for degraded lands.